Will cars eventually evolve into shuttle craft over time?

Define “shuttle craft”. The only place I know of that term is in Star Trek.

@zenvelo No. the NASA shuttles before they retired. Edit. Now that I think about it a Star Trek shuttle would do for this question.

Well…we thought so in the 1950s. Or maybe not “shuttle craft.” We thought we’d be driving flying cars by 2000. And have robots to do all our work while we relaxed. We didn’t ask how we’d get paid if we didn’t have to do anything but loaf.

Turns out our predictions were a little off.

@Jeruba
Because those predictions were assuming the development being done purely by scientists with unlimited funding.
And not private industry and their modus operandi of maximising profit by milking money from customers via small, incremental iterations of existing technology, instead of revolutionary innovation.
How much different really is the eyephone 6 from the first one?

Remember the Concorde? Humanity actually took steps backwards after that.

Remember The Jetsons?

Cars won’t evolve into shuttle crafts. Who needs a shuttle craft to go to the grocery store? And really, the design of a new generation of supersonic passenger craft is still only good for flights of 2,000 miles or more, and really only for flights of more than 5,000 miles or more.

Flying cars make some sense, but given traffic densities in urban situations in the present day world, the first step is to get self driving cars working in two dimensions.

There are so many obstacles to get past before that could be a thing. Air cars maybe. Cars that leave the atmosphere… only when we have some way to make that safe and sustainable. And before any of that, we will need to survive several environmental, socio-economic, and political crises. Also, probably a reason to want them, beyond seeing the view.

I don’t see the justification for them. They would be large and expensive to operate. Even if they were computer operated, safety concerns may not allow for them to fly very close to one another.